politics – Page 142

Will the Sixth Labour Government be a One-Term Affair?

The Sixth Labour Government has already made one colossal error in its short time in power, and it looks like it’s set up to make another. Considering that their grip on power was already slim, and that they are relying on the infamously treacherous Winston Peters to maintain it, there’s every chance that the Sixth Labour Government ends up being a one-term affair. This essay discusses the possibility.

There are many forces that threaten to tear apart every party in every Parliament, but within the New Zealand Labour Party some gigantic fissures are starting to become particularly prominent. The decision to raise the refugee quota was a slap in the face to the poorer voters within Labour, and can be counted as a colossal error. The other error will be forced by the referendum to legalise cannabis.

Make no mistake – raising the refugee quota was an error of profound magnitude. The reality of the situation is this: European governments have, for a couple of decades now, placed the needs of foreign “asylum seekers” above those of their own working classes, and the consequences of doing so are clear. Doing so will lead to a return of authoritarian populists, as has been shown with the rise of the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, the AfD in Germany and Matteo Salvini in Italy.

If you are a poor New Zealander, then you are probably a natural Labour voter, but it’s extremely galling to see Labour spending the money that could have helped you on refugees instead. Adding insult to injury, these refugees are usually dumped in working class areas because that’s where the cheapest housing is. The cherry on the top is that any working-class person who protests their demotion in favour of foreign chancers will be denounced by Labour supporters as a racist.

The decision to double the refugee quota will drive a thick wedge deeply between the working-class faction of Labour, who are dependent on a limited pool of government largesse for their personal well-being and who resent more people claiming a piece of it, and the champagne socialist faction, whose primary concern is virtue signalling for the sake of social status and advancement.

This is the current rupture. It’s unlikely that a populist worker’s movement will arise merely on the basis of this, but it will cause some Labour voters to switch to New Zealand First in 2020 and some to abstain.

The inevitable future rupture comes with the cannabis referendum that will likely be held near the end of 2019. Labour will not admit this, but the referendum has the potential to tear the Labour Party right down the centre, for demographic reasons. This is not a concern for either the Green, New Zealand First or National Parties, because the demographic equation does not apply in their cases.

Maori voters are massively in favour of cannabis law reform – this is one of the strongest relationships in all of New Zealand politics. The correlation between being Maori and voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2017 was 0.91. This is much stronger than all of the other well-accepted relationships in New Zealand society, and is immediately apparent if one observes the fact that the ALCP gets twice as many votes in Maori electorates as it does in General ones.

Pacific Islanders, by contrast, are much more lukewarm on the issue. The correlation between being a Pacific Islander and voting ALCP in 2017 was -0.00 (i.e. perfectly uncorrelated), much weaker than the correlation between being Maori and voting ALCP. The reason for this is clear if one looks at the general demographic profile of Pacific Islanders: they tend to be religious, and the religious tend to be prejudiced against cannabis.

Therefore, the Labour Party cannot avoid being divided when the cannabis referendum comes around, and they cannot avoid losing a large swathe of voters because someone will inevitably feel betrayed. Either Maori voters will punish them for being too strict on cannabis, or Pacific Islander voters will punish them for being too loose. So Labour is damned if they do campaign for change and damned if they don’t.

These two errors need to be viewed in their correct context. Many political commentators assume (incorrectly) that, because all political parties generally fall on a left-right spectrum, if a given voter doesn’t like the government of the day then they will move leftward or rightward to cast their vote next election.

The truth, as Dan McGlashan demonstrated in Understanding New Zealand, is that for many Kiwis, the alternative to voting Labour is not voting at all. If you are a working-class New Zealander, and therefore a natural Labour voter, the preferred option when Labour is too right-wing is not voting Greens but abstaining from voting.

As the article linked immediately above describes, the correlation between voting for Labour in 2017 and turnout rate in 2017 was a very strong -0.72. That tells us that as many as half of all natural Labour supporters actually don’t vote. The real challenge for the Labour Party is not convincing the masses that National is bad or even that Labour would be better, but convincing them that Labour would be better enough to make it worthwhile to vote for them, and to not rather abstain by way of protest.

The two major errors discussed in this article might collectively have the effect of significantly reducing support for the Labour Party. They have already greatly disappointed their voters who are dependent on social assistance, and the cannabis referendum will force them to either greatly disappoint Maoris (who will then abstain from voting in 2020) or greatly disappoint Pacific Islanders (who will then abstain or switch to National in 2020). This disappointment might be enough to tip the balance back towards National in 2020.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

The Many Faces of Winston Peters

The Case For Cannabis: Prohibition Harms Minorities

Cannabis prohibition causes harm across most levels of society, but some bear the brunt more than others. In the Western World, it can be seen that cannabis prohibition has a disproportionately heavy effect on minorities, and there are multiple reasons for this. This article will discuss the need for cannabis law reform from an ethnic rights perspective.

The South African High Court found found in a recent judgment that “the
criminalisation of cannabis […] is certainly characterised by the racist footprints of a disgraceful past.” In other words, the South African authorities are willing to admit that cannabis prohibition was forced on the people of South Africa out of malice.

They found that “it is general knowledge that some sections of the [Black] population have been accustomed for hundreds of years to the use of dagga, both as an intoxicant and in the belief that it has medicinal properties, and do not regard it with the same moral repugnance as do other sections of the population.”

It followed from this that the prohibition of cannabis and the normalisation of alcohol was to put European values first and foremost, and this was mentioned in part of their judgement when they made recreational cannabis legal earlier this year.

Ever since Jamestown – and possibly long before then – European colonialists knew that native peoples had a great susceptibility to alcohol. The American Indians called it ‘firewater’ for the explosively violent behaviour it caused among their kind. Rolling a barrel of rum into an Indian village had a similar effect to rolling a barrel of gunpowder into one.

The science is like this: in Europe, most of the people who could not handle alcohol had been wiped out of the gene pool over thousands of years of exposure. Anyone who chimped out when drunk got killed or put in prison, and thereby failed to reproduce. Consequently, Europeans (much like Middle Easterners) do not lose self-control when drunk at the same rate as peoples who have not had that historical exposure.

The people who conquered the New World did not understand the genetics behind this, but they were well aware of the destabilising effect that alcohol had on native communities. So they passed laws, such as cannabis prohibition, that forbade any alternative to alcohol. This forced the natives away from cannabis and forced them towards drugs that would destroy them.

Laws prohibiting alternatives to alcohol are extremely prejudiced in favour of European people and people of European descent. In terms of the damage it can do to people who don’t have a genetic resistance to it, alcohol is almost a bioweapon, and passing laws that prohibit recreational alternatives to it could rightly be seen as acts of genetic warfare against non-European populations.

In New Zealand, Maori leaders like to talk about economic reparations and the damage done by colonisation. But never do they talk about the damage done to Maoris by cannabis prohibition.

Maoris have no cultural tradition of alcohol drinking. Unlike Europeans, Polynesians have only been exposed to alcohol for a few centuries. This means that they have not had time to evolve a resistance to the substance, and neither have they had time to make alcohol part of their culture. Alcohol is a foreign substance to the New World, and it’s foreign to the natives here.

As anyone with a clue knows, Maoris love cannabis. Not only do you frequently see Maoris smoking weed at parties, but it’s common to see Maoris in the street wearing Bob Marley t-shirts or with the red-yellow-green of reggae culture somewhere in their clothing. Their love of cannabis is unrepentant – in other words, it’s part of the culture.

The reason for this is simple: not only is cannabis great fun, but Maoris are also aware of the destabilising effect that alcohol has on native communities, and have found that their social recreational drug needs can be met just as well by cannabis as by alcohol (in most cases). Given an even playing field, it’s better to smoke cannabis because it leads to much fewer problems, in particular much less violence.

However, although this behaviour is fair, rational and reasonable, it’s prohibited. There are hundreds of Maoris in prison right now for cannabis offences, even though the prohibition of cannabis has nothing to do with their culture and is something that was forced on them by (some) white people.

It follows, then, that anyone who is truly interested in racial justice in the West must also be in favour of cannabis law reform. This will not only give minorities an alternative to alcohol, instead of having alcohol culture forced on them, but it will remove one possible source of discrimination against those minorities by taking the issue away from Police discretion.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

The Five Acceptances

A previous essay here discussed the Five Rejections of alt-centrism. These are the five core political values held by rival ideologies that are repudiated by alt-centrists. Because alt-centrism is about finding the healthy and correct balance between the fundamental forces of reality, there are also Five Acceptances that mirror these rejections. This essay discusses them.

Alt-centrism accepts from the old right that there needs to be order.

Without order, life is nightmare. Without order we return to the hell of the primeval chaos that existed before civilisation. Nature is indeed red in tooth and claw, and the Great Work of Ages has been to raise us from this chaos through the correct imposition of order. The alt-centre accepts that this work has been done out of good will and that it was necessary.

Order has its own value, because it provides a space in which the mind can think freely. Alt-centrism accepts this. A house can be thought of as a place of order, within the four walls of which people can be free from the elements. The order within our society, likewise, offers free space for people to think and to live.

Alt-centrism accepts from the old left that there needs to be freedom.

Too much order means stagnation. This is not only unacceptable to the human spirit but it also makes us much weaker on account of that the suppressed will resent and fight their suppressors. Order can provide shelter, but it can also be a cage – the alt-centre accepts this.

People have to be free to explore (within good reason) boundaries of sensual and sensual pleasure, of all kinds of music, and of all kinds of consciousness-altering substances. The alt-centre accepts that alternative sexual practices, pornography, drugs and dancing are all legitimate expressions of the human spirit (as long as those participating are doing so consensually). Therefore, the alt-centre accepts that avenues of expression and exploration have to be legal unless there is a very good reason for them not to be.

Alt-centrism accepts from the old centrists that there needs to be a balance between order and chaos.

The alt-centre accepts the need for order, but does not feel obliged to agitate on behalf of more order. The alt-centre accepts the need for chaos, but does not feel obliged to agitate on behalf of more chaos. More precisely, there is a time and place for order and a time and place for chaos, and the alt-centre accepts that flexibility on this question is important for correct decisions to be made.

Major differences arise from the fact that the alt-centre believes that the old centre has struck a cowardly and insipid compromise of values, and that the alt-centre believes that the truly correct balance needs to be struck between other values than the old paradigm suggests. The alt-centrist is more likely to think in terms of materialist vs, non-materialist than in terms of capitalist vs. socialist.

Alt-centrism accepts from the alt-left that inequality is now at unacceptable levels.

The productivity gains of the last 50 years of economic development have not been shared among all social classes. Instead, they have been portioned out according to how much of those gains people have been able to grab by whatever means, whether force or trickery. Labour has never had a lower share of productivity in the West, and capital has never had a greater one. This threatens social cohesion, and needs to be opposed.

The alt-centre agrees that those who derive a financial benefit from the ordering of society need to pay a share of their wealth to ensure that those benefits perpetually arise to the people of the nation. It is accepted that capitalists cannot plunder the world’s natural resources without restraint or censure, because that will lead to there being nothing left for future generations. A balance with nature has to be struck; this is accepted.

Alt-centrism accepts from the alt-right that people have to have things in common in order to have the solidarity necessary to have a society.

This does not imply the need for ethnostates, but it requires a concession that those arguing on behalf of ethnostates have some valid points, based in reality. We know from economic psychology that wealthy people within a country are only willing to pay taxes to the degree that they feel they have something in common with the recipients of those taxes.

Therefore, leftist policies like importing hordes of “refugees” also threaten social cohesion, and should be repudiated so that genuine solidarity can continue to exist among the people. The greater the diversity of a nation, the less solidarity will exist between the groups within that nation, and therefore the less the wealthy are willing to help the poor.

These Five Acceptances represent the feminine expression of alt-centrism. in that they are accepting of and open to what the other ideologies have to offer. This contrasts with the Five Rejections, which are the masculine expression of alt-centrism, and which seek to delineate the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not.